Particle physicists build time machine

Back to the future, here we come. A couple a eggheads over at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, Russia, reckon that the boys at CERN have a surprise up their sleeves. They’ve gone and built themselves a time machine.

Yep, ya’ll heard right: a time machine.

The fellas at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory are currently tightening bolts and painting go-faster stripes on a shiny new accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider, which they hope to switch on sometime next year.

The plan is to hold one crazy demolition derby by smashing together protons and seeing what comes outta the wreckage. A lotta eggs have been a-ruminatin and a-speculatin on what this smash-em-up is gonna produce. On their wishlist are tiny blackholes, supersymmetric particles and the Higgs boson. It’s gonna be one helluva fireworks show.

Now Irena Aref’eva and Igor Volovich at the Steklov have pipped them all by calculatin’ that the LHC is gonna produce wormholes. Yep, and they say a proportion of these wormholes will form into traversible routes from one point in spacetime to another. In other words, these wormholes are time machines.

Irena and Igor (a lovely couple) say there is one caveat. Their thinkin’ depends on the scale of quantum gravity being very low energy: only a few TeVs and that ain’t likely.

What does it mean for us? Almost certainly nothin’. If Irena and Igor (lovely couple) are right, high energy collisions in the upper atmosphere will have been producing time machines since time immemorial. Our upper atmosphere is probably filled with em’. These time machines are also so short-lived that we can only see them by the signature they leave behind when they annihilate.

Time machines in the atmosphere? Perhaps that explains why we get so many repeats of Star Trek on terrestrial television.

This entry was posted
on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 12:56 am and is filed under Mean machines, Weird 'n' spooky.
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